28 (123).
10 Sept[ember] 1902.

I forgot to send you the dentist's letter*). I am sending it to you now, although it no longer has any particular significance. The dentist has calmed down somewhat*), but his mood, as expressed in the letter, undoubtedly reflects only the desolation in which the dentist lives, and an almost complete lack of living impressions from the movement. As a result—a very melancholy, depressed mood. How to help with this, I do not know, since there is no dragging the dentist out of here. 

But I pity him greatly.

In all probability I shall come to you in about 10-12 days. Unfortunately, I shall not stay with you very long, since, alas! the doctor has categorically forbidden me to live in England. But as to where it would be better for me to settle, we shall discuss this when we meet.

A letter from Yulius [Martov] troubled me. He has launched such a battery against living in Lond[on] that I have already been thinking that you all have decided to flee from here and stand for relocation to Geneva. If this comes to pass**), then in any case we must first sort things out precisely. I have already written to you that it would be possible to establish S E P A R A T E (two-group) responsibility before the party. In essence this is close to your project of two editorial boards. But perhaps it would be important to preserve a certain F O R M A L connection, in order to appear in a series of questions (for example, economic ones) before the party as a unified whole. We absolutely must defend in the agreement a certain autonomy, and in no way whatever surrender ourselves entirely to the will of the party.

') And he himself acknowledged that if he was dissatisfied with anything, he should have stated this earlier, when the article was still in hand.

**) For now I cannot at all judge how it will turn out.

A. N. POTRESOV — V. I. LENIN

A. N. POTRESOV ---- V. I. LENIN
161

Please indicate to me where I should stay in London. Although I am not entirely without language, I am approximately as if without one.

Please answer what I asked you about V[era] I[vanov]na [Zasulich].

It is most disagreeable to me that I had to refuse your proposal to go to the Party Congress. But I am simply unable to carry this out extemporaneously at the very last moment. Well, I shall conclude.

I press your hand firmly.

P.S. The passage from your article*) about which there is a dispute can certainly be commented upon, and in the final analysis you can bite back at the attacks. That is not the point, but rather that the F I R S T (and most important) impression the reader will have is that you have exaggerated here, without making the necessary qualifications. P R A C T I C A L L Y they worked excellently among the workers no worse than the soc[ial]-dem[ocrats]. But they did not poke their nose into theory until the very last moment. I am speaking, of course, about the Socialist[s] Revolutionar[ies] who acted in Russia, not the ones abroad. And what is "Workers' Banner"?) 

Kautsky's Soziale] Revolution) I find extraordinarily pleasing, and it is of course far more interesting than Plekhanov's works.

I am also sending the dentist's letter.

¹) The dentist—concerning whom the matter pertains—could not be identified.

²) A. N. Potresov is speaking of V. I. Lenin's article on socialist-revolutionaries in nos. 23 and 24 of Iskra: "Revolutionary Adventurism." (Collected Works, vol. IV, pp. 118 and 126.)

*) "Workers' Banner" ("Rabochee Znamya") was the organ of a group of the same name. The "Workers' Banner" group arose in 1897 in Białystok as an opposition to the circle-based tendency of the local social-democratic organization "Bund"—"Group of Workers' Revolutionaries." The "Workers' Banner" group went through several stages of development—in Petersburg, where it was connected with the "Petersburg Union of Struggle," in Kiev, Kharkov and other cities. At the beginning of 1898 it published the program of the "Russian Social-Democratic Party" and began publishing the organ "Workers' Banner" (three issues appeared). The subsequent evolution divided the group into two parts—one, the smaller part, joined the socialist-revolutionaries (B. Savinkov and others), the other merged with the Petersburg and foreign Iskra organization.

The most prominent members of the group at different times were—M. Lurye, A. Lurye, S. V. Andropov, I. M. Romm, V. P. Nogin, A. Solin, S. O. Tsederbaum-Ezhov, D. Gershanovich and others. V. I. Nogin and S. V. Andropov, after their arrest in connection with the group's case in Petersburg, went abroad to London, where they became Iskra supporters (1900-1901) and worked as agents of Iskra.* V. P. Nogin in Petersburg, working underground, achieved the unification of the "Petersburg Union of Struggle" with the Iskra organization and was soon arrested in Kazan (August 26, 1901). See S. N. Valk "Toward a Documentary History of 'Workers' Banner'," "Red Chronicle," nos. 2-3, and his "Hist.-Revolutionary Collection," vol. I, SPB. 1923, "Petersburg Group," "Workers' Banner," p. 127 and "Proletarian Revolution" for 1924, nos. 8-9 (31-32) and no. 11 (34)—letters of V. P. Nogin and S. V. Andropov.

A. N. Potresov's question about "Workers' Banner" is explained by the fact that in 1902 precisely a part of the Workers' Banner members, having joined the Iskra organizations, displayed considerable energy in working-class circles: for example, the Kiev committee of "Workers' Banner," which had joined the Iskra organization at the end of 1901 and which developed substantial work in the first half of 1902, when A. Kuznetsova, sent to Kiev by Iskra, stood at the head of the Workers' Banner group and when the unification of the Workers' Banner members with the Kiev committee of the R.S.D.R.P. took place.

⁴) Soziale Revolution—"Social Revolution"—a work by K. Kautsky. In the Russian translation by A. A. Sanin it was first published in June 1903 under the editorship of N. Lenin in the Iskra publishing house.